John Green: The Fault in Our Stars Doesn't Belong to Me

The Fault in Our Stars writer John Green is an unlikely teen icon. The 36-year-old Kenyon College graduate has written several popular novels, but stayed largely out of the spotlight with his wife and two children in Indianapolis, Indiana—until now. Since it was announced that Shailene Woodley and Ansel Elgort would bring The Fault in Our Stars to life on film, Green's celeb status has ratcheted up a few notches. So a few weeks ago when a huge group of teen girls gathered outside the Four Seasons hotel in Beverly Hills, it was easy to assume that the crowd was waiting there for the author. "It's for Justin Bieber," Green, who was sitting at a table in the empty hotel lobby bar, said with a laugh. "We asked."

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Bieber's presence in the same hotel is ironic since Glee star Chris Colfer once referred to the author as "the Justin Bieber of the literary world." The fact that the two can draw similar crowds says something about the level of adoration for Green's novel, which landed him on TIME's 100 Most Influential People list earlier this year. Throughout our conversation, Green seemed both bewildered and not at all fazed by the fame he's earned from the tale of two star-crossed teenagers, Hazel Grace Lancaster (Woodley) and Augustus Waters (Elgort), who deal with cancer and falling in love simultaneously. It's a remarkably beautiful and tragic book and the film adaptation, out Friday, is equally beautiful and equally tragic. It's a story that resonates universally, even if that story was initially written for the teen crowd. Although Green's 2005 book Looking for Alaska was previously optioned by Paramount, it was never made into a movie. So for Green, watching The Fault in Our Stars be transformed into a film that captures the essence of his story was something close to a miracle:

What's the process like of having your book become a film?

There was a lot of interest immediately after the book came out. It's a really personal story to me. It's really important to me that it be preserved and honored if it were going to be a movie. So I wasn't particularly keen to sell the rights at all. But then the producers came to an event I did in Los Angeles and they were clearly the people who shared my vision for the movie and understood the book very deeply. I had no contractual control over who the screenwriters were but they welcomed me into that process. The most important thing for me was when they sent me The Spectacular Now script [which also starred Shailene Woodley]. I'd read that book and thought it was a very interesting adaptation and that Scott Neustadter and Michael Weber would be perfect. They're good at finding tone, which is a hard thing to do in a movie.

Photo: Everett Collection

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It seems like The Fault in Our Stars could never have worked without Hazel's voiceover in the film version.

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Yeah, you need the voiceover in this movie. You don't need a ton of it, but you need some. It's writer-y. There's something written about the way she talks and that was a conscious choice. The heightened language of romantic tragedies has been with us since Romeo and Juliet–and even before that. I did want to see that preserved because I like that convention of the star-crossed lovers genre. The language itself is heightened as a way of bringing out the realness of the love and also the realness of the tragedy. And they did a great job with the script. I didn't have much to stay about it.

Really?

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I told them to make it a little less like the book in a few places, but other than that I didn't have much to say. That has not my experience in the past. In the past I've had lots to say. It's a very good script.

Did you have a say in the casting?

Not in the sense that I'm a casting director. But I got to hang out with our casting director a lot and I got to see a lot of audition tapes. I got to be a voice in the room but not the most important voice. The only time I had some sway is with Shailene. If Shailene Woodley wants to be in your movie then that is a privilege and you say yes. That was my feeling. Casting Gus is a lot harder. He's a harder character in some ways. But I was a big advocate for Ansel.

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Not to disrespect how good Shailene is in the film, but Ansel is the real star.

He's kind of the revelation of the movie, isn't he? We all knew Shailene is a great actress. Gus is a really hard character because his heroic journey goes from strength to weakness, instead of the usual hero's journey from weakness to strength. A lot of the people who auditioned really struggled with that. And Ansel just saw it immediately and he saw Gus immediately in deep ways. I watched the movie being filmed and knew he was doing a great job, but I had no idea he was doing that great of a job until I saw it all together. He's just brilliant.

As the author did you have to reconcile a disconnect between what was in your head and then what you saw onscreen?

The book had been written such a long time before. I had a year and a half to get used to the idea of the book not being mine anymore. I think a book comes out and then it belongs to its readers. They make of it what they can. I didn't feel any sense of ownership over it, but I felt a responsibility to the people who cared about the book to try to honor it, to try to capture what people responded to in the book. Pretty much from the first day I felt really grateful and lucky. It was the most charmed movie experience possible. I was asked to be on set the entire time. I became really close to the actors. I was so proud of the work they were doing. I felt really grateful that these people were sharing their talent with the story. It's a very uncommon thing that a movie is made purely because everyone involved cares about the story and that's what happened here.

Photo: Everett Collection

Everett Collection

There's been a lot of chatter about how much you were crying on set. Is that true?

I did cry a lot on set. I mean, I cried because I was sad a lot of times because sad things were happening in the story. But I also cried because I was overwhelmed. I was overwhelmed with all these people, this massive crew of over 100 people, coming together to make this movie. It's totally overwhelming. I'm not usually a crier, but I did cry almost every day.

And now you're immortalized in history as one.

As a crier! I know. I cried when I watched the movie, too. I cried for the last hour of it.

I cried for the whole movie, if we're being honest. But what struck me is that I thought I would leave really sad, but instead I felt hopeful and inspired.

That's the tone I wanted to capture in the book. That you would leave the story hopeful and encouraged. The nicest thing anyone ever said about the book to me is my friend Markus Zusak, who wrote The Book Thief, said, "It's an encouragement, but not a lame one." That's really what I wanted to make. Something that was an encouragement, but one that you could take down into the darkness and it would still give you light.